March 2020. On The Road by Jack Kerouac
1957, Penguin Essentials, 281 pages. Written in English, read in English.
My initiation to beat writing was not optimal, starting with William S. Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch”. Had I started with this novel, my opinion of the whole sub-genre may have been different.
While this is the first time I read this book, I’ve known of the concept for a long while — I’ve read about the initial version, written as a scroll of pasted-together papers that were fed to Kerouac’s typewriter, starting the literary concept of stream of consciousness — this version that I’ve read, as far as I understood, is a later, more structured version.
It’s a partially autobiographical, partially fictional, road trip novel, in which there are two protagonists fleeing from something, maybe themselves, across the length of the United States — New York to San Francisco and back again, with a short departure to Mexico as well. The two characters are representations of the author himself — hidden behind the name Sal Paradise, and his friend Neil Cassady — another beat poet/author whom I don’t know — who is represented as Dean Moriarty. They are surrounded by fictional characters, all based on real people in the life of Jack Kerouac. Some were easy to guess, based on traits and circumstances in the book — Carlo Marx, for example, is Allen Ginsberg, and Old Bull Lee is William S. Burroughs. Others, whom I don’t know, were less recognizable.
Along with the descriptions of Paradise’s and Moriarty’s attempts to reach across the breadth and depth of America, by any means of transportation they could find, there are descriptions of subcultures and countercultures that were less represented in that day’s literature — Jazz, and be-bop, specifically, and drug use culture — and there is a revival of the vagabond philosophy, that started as necessity in the twenties and thirties, and reached a lifecycle stage of a rebellious device in this novel, right before the sixties had started.
The novel ends in the same way it began — with Moriarty lost to Paradise again, Paradise in his settled-down, back in New York phase, disappearing within his own manic way of arriving at places and departing. And again, maybe I can rewrite the history of my beat literature reading, and declare this one the first book of the genre I’ve read. So Kerouac, starting his rise to fame on the road, becomes a road paver.
The April 2020 selection for the David Bowie Book Club will be Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom by Peter Guralnick.
